Strategies to Grow Your Business

3 Salesforce.com Activity History Best Practices

Your Salesforce.com activity history gives your team members and yourself context of what has happened in the past. This allows for team selling, servicing and marketing. The activity history keeps everyone on the same page.

Part of aligning your team to your sales or service process means giving guidance on recording activities within your Salesforce.com records. Assume the following:

Your recorded tasks and activities are for internal consumption

Activities show progress

Everyone records any touch point with the customer

If these assumptions are met then your team will benefit from having access to relevant information when they are engaging a Contact or Lead in your system.

Be sure the following are part of your Salesforce.com activity logging:

Make notes for the next person. You are not just recording notes of a conversation or a call for yourself. It is also for your team. Ensure that there is context and the language is clear. If they have to ask you for clarification then this is an indicator that your notes need to be more thorough. Make a rule that if it’s not in Salesforce.com it did not happen.

Make it easy to record notes. If you have a field sales team, it may be more difficult to get them to align and record notes. You can use a variety of methods such as metrics for their activities, audio recording integration or set a new process. A new process might include having them email a person on your team from their mobile device to record the notes for them. Do what works. The important thing is that the notes get into your system.

Create selectable Subject topics. Within the Log A Call or Task function in Salesforce.com, you can customize the Subject field to have predetermined values. Use this to build a process with a framework of frequent activities. These should be sequential. Furthermore, they can be used for creating Activity reports in Salesforce.com for management. For the end user, it is a productivity enhancement.

As you launch your Salesforce.com system and train your team, your culture will be set on this pivotal aspect of Salesforce.com. Be sure that there are weekly meetings to review Activities until you feel there is a culture and habit around recording all activities.

If everything is in your system, then this will create clarity for your team. They will be using your system rather than relying on meetings and verbal communications because their system contains the details. Make it a valuable asset to your business by emphasizing this fundamental aspect of Salesforce.com.